经济学4Hyman Minsky 2.docxVIP

Did Hyman Minsky find the secret behind financial crashes?American economist Hyman Minsky, who died in 1996, grew up during the Great Depression, an event which shaped his views and set him on a crusade to explain how it happened and how a repeat could be prevented, writes Duncan Weldon.Minsky spent his life on the margins of economics but his ideas suddenly gained currency with the 2007-08 financial crisis. To many, it seemed to offer one of the most plausible貌似有理的 accounts of why it had happened.His long out-of-print books were suddenly in high demand with copies changing hands for hundreds of dollars - not bad for densely 浓密的written tomes with titles like Stabilizing an Unstable Economy.Senior central bankers including current US Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen and the Bank of Englands Mervyn King began quoting his insights. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman named a high profile talk about the financial crisis The Night They Re-read Minsky.Here are five of his ideas.Stability is destabilising不稳定的Minskys main idea is so simple that it could fit on a T-shirt, with just three words: Stability is destabilising.Most macroeconomists 微观经济学work with what they call equilibrium平衡 models - the idea is that a modern market economy is fundamentally stable. That is not to say nothing ever changes but it grows in a steady way.To generate an economic crisis or a sudden boom some sort of external shock has to occur - whether that be a rise in oil prices, a war or the invention of the internet.Minsky disagreed. He thought that the system itself could generate shocks through its own internal dynamics.动态的 He believed that during periods of economic stability, banks, firms and other economic agents become complacent.自满的They assume that the good times will keep on going and begin to take ever greater risks in pursuit of profit. So the seeds of the next crisis are sown in the good time.Three stages of debtMinsky had a theory, the financial instability hypothesis, arguing t